78 What is Architectural History?
the poor fortunes of Phineas G. Nanson in A. S. Byatt’s The
Biographer’s Tale.^1 This is not to suggest that historians of
architecture have failed to take such gambles. For some this
merely makes the research more challenging – and more
rewarding. Architectural historians have in recent decades
borrowed and developed a number of tools to neutralize the
effect of the apparent absence of traditional forms of evi-
dence for emerging problems in architectural history and
historiography. Especially has this been so in the postcolonial
historiography of architecture and in sexuality- and gender-
based revisionist histories, which confront and undermine the
monolithic, hetero-masculine and Western perspectives and
categories that shaped the modern fi eld for its fi rst century,
and which persist today.^2 Yet from the most traditional to
the most experimental approaches to the writing of architec-
tural history, the basic point stands: an architectural histo-
rian will have either knowledge or intuition about the material
on which they might base their study, and where it might be
found. The scale of available evidence will inform the scale
of the work attempted by the historian.
To recap: architecture is architectural history’s substance.
The material, ephemeral and conceptual traces of that content
are architectural history’s evidence. The defi nition of archi-
tecture as a subject of historical study lies between architec-
tural history’s conceptual and technical content and its
traces in the world. This defi nition of architecture’s historical
extent can be made as broad or as narrow as the architec-
tural historian can justify on conceptual, epistemological
or evidentiary grounds. An evidentiary fi eld refl ecting the
historian’s view will, however, serve his or her construal of
the historical (and by extension contemporary) architectural
subject.
Where issues of approach – method, frame, conceptual
presuppositions – determine the shape of an architectural
history, the concomitant limitations placed by the architec-
tural historian upon their material will inform the matter of
that history, and ultimately the kinds of conclusions available
to the historian. A history concerning the recovery of a design
decision does not necessarily need to have recourse to the
same kind of evidence as a history concerning the social
signifi cance of a particular public or semi-public site. These